The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has noticed an increase in bot activity on the encyclopedic website, and a decline of approximately 8 percent in human page views. The non-profit says the trend is due to a combination of the impact of social media and generative AI as informational sources for potential visitors. AI now provides summarized answers to user questions, while younger people are increasingly finding information through social video. The Foundation’s organizers say the audience loss could have a negative effect on Wikipedia donors as well as the human volunteers who keep the site current.

“We are seeing declines in human page views on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8 percent as compared to the same months in 2024,” the Wikimedia Foundation’s Marshall Miller writes in a blog post. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

“Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an Internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop, but it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends,” writes TechCrunch, noting “Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries of its own, though it paused the effort after editors complained.”

This shift in consumer behavior is not unique to Wikipedia, Miller says, citing “many other publishers and content platforms” experiencing similarly detrimental effects as a result of search engines, AI chatbots, social media and “the strain that these companies are putting on their infrastructure.”

PCMag points out that Wikipedia is “still a strong presence in the world of online information,” because even though fewer people are visiting the site directly, “it remains one of the most popular sources of training data for large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.”

The result is that “users are still gaining knowledge from the site — just in a more indirect way,” though the sheer volume increase of data-scraping bots “has caused issues for the platform, straining its resources and increasing its hosting costs,” PCMag adds.

And that isn’t the extent of recent problems for Wikipedia, which “has been the site of several battles in the overall culture war,” AV Club writes, citing allegations of bias by figures on the right, including Elon Musk, who “claimed he was working on his own version called ‘Grokipedia’” after his Grok AI.

In an interview with The New York Times, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said the attacks have boosted fundraising.

Related:
The Interview: The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course, The New York Times, 10/18/25